The Saga of the Bloody Benders by Rick Geary

So, in another slightly embarrassing admission on this blog, I will tell you that I went through a phase in life (during early highschool, it corresponded with the purchase of an eight foot tall Joy Division poster, the obsessive rewatching of the Crow and the first reading of In Cold Blood), where I was really interested in famous murderers and murder trials. For those of you who don't know, there are such things as serial killer trading cards of which I had many - had I the resources, I would have joined John Waters in traveling around the world getting to know famous convicts, taking notes at trials - I found this element of culture incurably fascinating - especially when it involved a complex mythology or system of ethics that supposedly justified violent action - either on the part of the killer or those in the media. Anyway, the point of this little ramble is that I am surprised that I had never encountered Rick Geary comics before. Beginning with his collection a Treasury of Victorian Murder, he has begun a series of nonfictional accounts of famous murders. A friend of mine who read on my blog that I was taking suggestions concerning graphic novels very kindly brought me a copy of the Bloody Benders - friends who bring you books are the best friends you can have.

The Bloody Benders was awesome - clearly Geary is devoted to research, detail and context - not to the detriment of the story but to its credit. I had no knowledge of the Bloody Bender story and now I want to know everything! Essentially a family (the members of which may or may not be related) of German immigrants settle in the prairie of Kansas, buying property, building a small store and placing themselves in the community just as much as necessary. The daughter, the captivating spirit medium Katie Bender is believed to be the ringleader of the operation, luring in travelers and members of the community alike into their home and setting them up for murder. People start to disappear, family members start questioning, sending out search parties and eventually the town decides to investigate. All of a sudden the Benders pick up stakes and are never truly heard from again. Sightings and possible identifications abound, the legend grows and the body count ticks up and up and up - leaving everyone wondering how this had happened in their home but also why? Motivations are never given, although the speculation is that Katie is some kind of unhinged spiritual maniac, Geary's last page has her looming spectre inside of the clouds, insane eyes, wielding a knife, looking down on the Kansas prairie. Geary clearly loved the character of Katie, he devotes energy to developing her imposing physicality and and questionable, menacing energies. He contrasts his drawings of her with the presentation he uses for most characters - an almost posed, photographic quality that evokes the world weary, tough look of American pioneers. He uses hatching to create a kind of heavy relief and contrast between dark and light. He maintains a matter of fact tone, laying out descriptions of crimes next to detailed maps of the area. I am excited to delve into the rest of the series, which covers more famous murders (i.e. Jack the Ripper, Lizzie Borden).

Raise High The Roof Beam Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction by J.D. Salinger

“A confessional passage has probably never been written that didn’t stink a little bit of the writer’s pride in having given up his pride.”

Salinger has always been hard to write about - his reputation and the cultural lunacy that has sprung up around him tends to eclipse his actual work, making it next to impossible to say something meaningful without your opinions and passions being lumped into the general mass. I also think that, like many people who take their reading seriously, there is usually a phase in which you shrug off Salinger - precisely because of that reputation. Catcher in the Rye is something you read in high school, and has become a kind of bible for the self indulgently rebellious, people claiming a false mantle of different and edgy, a caricature of the disaffected. In a way for years I had inadvertently bought into that same incredibly lame and half cocked image, simply by refusing to acknowledge Salinger's genius work because he was lauded by people who annoyed me. It's an embarassing thing to admit, but I'm willing to cop to it.

After his passing last week, I decided to reread my favorite of his works and I'm infinitely glad that I did. It's up there with Turn of the Screw or The Ballad of Sad Cafe in my esteem, it has a sense of humor and emotional resonance that propels you through the narrative. Buddy Glass returns as a familiar narrator, taking us through Seymour's wedding day. Buddy is on leave to attend the wedding, shows up as the only groom's guest, and clings in a moment of confusion to the wedding party of the devastated bride who has just been left at the altar because her fiancee had claimed to be "too happy" to get married. Buddy finds himself trapped in gridlock in a limo with the Maid of Honor, a gruff and aggressive woman who has little love for Seymour now that he's put her friend through such a tragedy, her husband who is just along for the ride, a deaf mute man whose presence serves as a balm for Buddy's tattered nerves and the bride's less than pleased aunt. As per usual, the Glass siblings serve as the backdrop for the narrative, Buddy's descriptions are fluid and hilarious as always, perhaps more so in this case because of his relative isolation from his family members. He hops between character descriptions, and expands upon each person with increasing depth until their place in the story becomes both inescapable and satisfying - by the end of the short novella, they all feel like old friends with whom you share inside jokes and the recognition of the tiniest, endearing character flaws.

The second novella, Seymour: An Introduction, is less exciting to me - it has always seemed so painstakingly crafted, overly precious at times and purposefully obtuse at otheres. This is Buddy's introduction to his brother, compiling reflections and anecdotes about someone who has always struck me as a kind of obnoxious guy. Seymour is smarter than everyone, smugger than everyone and supposedly too nice to even notice. Seymour represents every problem I have with Salinger - he tends to squeeze every ounce of meaning out of the details and by pointing them out makes reading so unchallenging and unexciting that its difficult to get through no matter how straightforward his prose may be. This is the stuff of Salingers that spawned things like Garden State - quirky overly clever characters yearning for some kind of authenticity in a world that - goddamnit - just doesn't understand them. The tone is so drastically different between the two pieces - they have the same narrator - but in the first instance Buddy is fictionalizing the day of his brother's wedding whereas the second part is a rambling, semi autobiographical, reflection on Seymour. Buddy's charm is lost, his humor is gone, he overreaches for emotional effect and it leaves me with such a sour taste in my mouth...and it's truly ironic because it runs at such a countercurrent to everything with which Salinger (via Holden Caulfield) has become synonymous - being a phony.

So I guess in thinking about Salinger's legacy, I would hope that people can read him with a critical eye and not lump everything into an untouchable cache of cool as it has tended to be in the past. I also hope that his wishes are respected and that thousands of awful people don't come rushing to make nauseating film adaptations of his books. Let our most famous literary recluse stay that way, that's part of what made him so sustainably interesting and enduring. For goodness sakes please don't ruin it, love it or hate it or something in between but please please don't ruin it.

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

"You're not going to be different ... you're going to be the same as you've always been; with doubts, everlasting dissatisfaction with yourself, vain efforts to amend, and falls, and everlasting expectation, of a happiness which you won't get, and which isn't possible for you."

"They ought to find out how to vaccinate for love, like smallpox."

I guess that I had always assumed that Tolstoy was boring...or maybe I just spent too many years hating Harold Bloom...or maybe I was slightly intimidated. Tolstoy can be a daunting figure. The combined weight of page count, historical importance and literary heft makes for a difficult start. It had gotten to a point though, where several people whose opinions and tastes I respect immensely were shocked to the point of annoyance at my reluctance to pick up one of the world's most consistently beloved books. So I finally put aside the expectations and tried to dive in....luckily for me, Tolstoy is everything he's cracked up to be and Anna Karenina is one of the most absorbing books I have ever read.

In case you weren't aware, this is a very large novel, divided into eight parts (originally published serially). There is really no point in me summarizing it, in fact I think that summarizing it would take away from the pleasure of reading it. The plot so artfully unfolds at the pace of every day life, capturing the resting moments between action in an almost breathtaking way. The panorama of characters Tolstoy builds upon are in constant states of agitation - whether it is spiritual, social, financial and its consistent shift in perspective between the major characters gives us insight into their attitudes and interior struggles. Towards the end, when focused on Anna's unraveling, Tolstoy stylistically anticipates the stream of consciousness techniques that become the hallmark of some of my favorite modernist works (aka there is no Mrs. Dalloway without Anna Karenina). I do wish that I knew more about Russian history - while i still enjoyed reading through the political arguments about the role of the peasant, theories of labor and technology etc., that take place at almost every social function, I feel as if I couldn't quite place my finger on what was going on some of the time. Tolstoy is clearly using his well crafted characters to convey political meaning, giving a snapshot of the political climate of the time, his own preoccupations and in a lasting way, the relationship of political theory to individual lives.

All of our beloved characters oscillate between the socially active, morally ambiguous, distracting tempo of city life with the purity of agricultural life - one of the most unexpectedly affecting scenes is nothing but one man threshing wheat for hours on end. It's insane how gorgeous this scene is. My preferred moments however, and they occur quite often, are Tolstoy's brilliant depictions of the failure of communication. Everyone always has so much to say and they can never ever figure out how to say it to the person with whom communication is vital. Anna cannot communicate with Vronsky, Karenin cannot talk to his wife, Kitty and Levin take years to traverse a misunderstanding. Another absolutely beautiful scene takes place between two marginal characters who everyone expects to profess their love for one another while taking a walk - the weight of expectation in the air, they begin their walk. Tolstoy takes us through each of their thought processes in which each of them goes from expectation to elation to tragic disappointment while walking together and talking only about birds. The moment that could have changed their lives forever comes and goes within minutes and they feel it as soon as it passes.

Ultimately though, the novel is a tragedy, a portrait of dynamic and misunderstood woman whose life is ruined because of her infidelity (while of course, many other characters are continually unfaithful or otherwise morally ambiguous with no consequence). She is judged and scorned by compulsive gamblers, self righteous idiots, gossipy manipulators and everyone in between. She is undeniably full of life and even after the world has abused her she continues to put on a brave face and never becomes spiteful. Her own descent into ruinous jealousy stems only from the utter isolation and entrapment of her life - she is not protected in fact of by law, has no family, is separated from her son and society. The mindboggling hipocrisy of the people surrounding Anna is devastating and is made even more infuriating by the way in which they are unaffected by tragedy. The end of the novel was difficult to me - Tolstoy wrote a kind of extended denouement after the climax of the plot - which at first struck me as callous and anticlimactic. These feelings were somewhat stoked by reading this a piece by Stephen Emms over at the Guardian who had also recently fallen in love with Anna but had fallen seriously out of love with the ending. But, after talking it over an amazingly intelligent friend whose love for Anna Karenina partly convinced me to finally pick it up, I realized that the end achieved exactly what it was meant to. It's meant to make you angry and sad and unsatisfied in the sense that that's how you should feel about the way that life just kind of putters on no matter what happens. Horrible things happen, the world treats amazing people poorly and no matter how unspeakable the consequences are, life has to go on and chances are that everyone is still going to be petty and preoccupied and sometimes disappointing. At this point it seems beyond saying but Bravo Tolstoy, Bravo.

A History of Violence by John Wagner and Vince Locke

I confess that I didn't know that this amazing amazing Cronenberg movie had come from a graphic novel - the movie blew my mind when I saw it, its quiet, menacing, claustrohpobic mood so brilliantly effected me and those around me. The story is captivating, a small town family man gets thrust into the spotlight when he protects his diner and a few of his neighbors from a few criminals who attempt to rob him. The spotlight leads a group of truly awful people from his past to track him down in his new life, turning his world inside out, making his family question him, forcing him to protect his new reality from the mistakes he made in his youth.

The movie focuses mainly on the action after Tom McKenna's heroism and subsequent unraveling of his life - whereas the graphic novel gives you an enormous amount of exposition and much more grotesque conclusion than the film dared to. Tom and his friend had ripped off the mob and the exposition makes it clear that they did this as young people with few options trying to help their families and counterbalance the negative effects the mob has had on their community. Tom's friend can't hide the money - flaunting his victory all over town and giving away their secret in the most trivial of ways, causing the mob to retaliate and Tom to run away and start a new life in a small town. As things begin to fall apart for Tom, his desperation is palpable, the regret he feels at the way his family will from now on look at him, the violence he must resort to and the danger his family has fallen into.

I have to say though, that I liked the movie better - I feel in this case that the cuts made to the story were amazing, creating the kind of tension you cannot maintain with so much explanation. In the movie you never reeeeally know what happened or why and so your impression of Tom goes under the same stages of doubt and suspicion that his family does. The novel gives you a play by play that creates a much more sympathetic character but a far less interesting one. Even aesthetically, casting Viggo (while undeniably extremely handsome), is an interesting and unusual looking man in contrast to the novel's Tom who has as Liz Lemon would say "airline pilot" good looks. The character of the wife is almost completely ignored in the novel, the process of her acceptance of Tom's past is so easy and blindly layed out that it just plays false. The visual style was a bit too chaotic for me too, and while clearly this was the intention, it was distracting from everything else going on and made me put the book down several times in order to concentrate.

Blankets by Craig Thompson

“how satisfying it is to leave a mark on a blank surface.”

So, my initial forays into the world of the graphic novel have been pretty fantastic. Autobiography seems to be a popular genre for the graphic novelist, and typically this isn't a genre which particularly interests me unless its someone that I'm already pretty excited about. Luckily the last two I've read, Fun Home and Blankets have been phenomenal. They couldn't be more different, Thompson's story is much more self indulgent in the sense that it is entirely focused on personal growth. Obviously he uses different points in his life, different external factors and relationships to move his journey along but ultimately it is an internal development and one that brings him from a guilt ridden abuse victim to a self assured artist and someone who has an enormous capacity for love.

The novel begins in Thompson's early childhood, taking us through the emotional abuse inflicted by his father, the sexual abuse of his babysitter, the intense religious beliefs fostered by his family and community and the guilt that he feels at not being able to spare his brother the same fate. The line quality of Thompson's drawings is the simplest and most straightforward I've encountered to date, allowing him to manipulate the single line to many broad emotional strokes. He can convincingly grow older and more emotionally complex while retaining the clarity and accessibility of a youthful perspective. Blankets of sorts become the connective tissue of his development, from the bed he shares as a child with his brother to the handmade quilt made for him by his girlfriend, but the larger idea is comfort and protection. Craig creates his own world through dreams and drawings and his Christian faith and struggles when thos protective mechanisms come into conflict.

His identity as well as his socio economic realities puts him at odds with the mainstream of his Christian peer group, and his questioning of the uniformity of Christianity stands at odds with his ideas about individual faith. At his annual church camp excursion, when he is finally at an age where he can identify and feel comfortable approaching other "outsiders", he meets Raina who quickly becomes his muse and first love. After they leave camp, they begin an intense correspondence and eventually make plans for a visit. A large part of the book deals with this extremely brief visit, where Thompson intricately depicts the dynamics of Raina's family. Her parents are in the middle of a divorce that has left her mother using pills, oversleeping and leaving the care of her two mentally handicapped children in the hands of Raina.

Thompson has a somewhat dreamy style, drawing Raina in elaborate dreamstates, raising their day to day interactions to the realm of myth. Apparently, he worked with a watercolor brush, giving the lines a kind of sweeping motion that lends an ethereal quality. These scenes with Raina return him to the art that he had used as a child to escape his reality, providing him with a protective mechanism and comfort that his religion had forced him out of. Ultimately this story chronicles Thompson's realizations about the necessity of his art - of creating impact and of creating connections that nurture you. It propels you through his life crystallizing around his experiences sleeping next to another person, what it feels like to share your space, your dreams. His art not only becomes a cathartic action for him alone but another blanket (I know, subtle) for him to share out of love instead of fear. It's difficult to explain for me, but this story just leaves you with a feeling of being surrounded, comforted, quiet and safe, it accomplishes this feeling like nothing I've ever read.

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Allison Bechdel

Now that I’ve read it, I completely understand the looks of shock and dismay on the faces of those who have asked me for my thoughts and been met with the response of “I just haven’t felt compelled”. Allison Bechdel’s Fun Home is absolutely beautiful, gracefully treading that line between intellectual and cerebral, a nontraditional coming of age story in which she struggles to foster the links between her and her father through their love of literature and their queerness against a backdrop of global events that draws the story out if its shell.

Bechdel pulls us into her world through her father's obsessive behaviors and attitudes towards restoring their Victorian home. Everyone in Fun Home has a tangible fixation, an attachment to artifice that clouds the depth of the complex relationships and emotions residing beneath those surfaces. Allison develops a connection to the trappings of masculinity showing the same attention to detail that her father so painstakingly exerts into their house.

After beginning college and discovering - through books - that she is a lesbian, she comes out to her parents through a letter. Their responses are unique to their situations, her mother expressing regret at her daughter's "choice" and revealing a long heretofore secret history of her father's dalliances with the younger men in their lives - babysitters, his highschool english students, teenagers he hired to work in the yard. Allison is at once startled, feeling a kinship with her father but she is also annoyed that he has in effect, stolen her thunder. Her father dies soon after and she cannot divorce those two events in her mind, forever changing her memories of her father and even the smallest of their interactions. Every remaining moment of the novel circles the drain of this central idea, the revelation of her sexuality leading to her father's death.

Appropriately enough, Bechdel discovers the most truth about her family in fictional tropes and imagery, reaching into the literary past to understand the present. One of the first images of the novel is of Allison and her father playing airplane with her projecting the ideas of Daedelus and Icarus onto the past. In one of her more impressively self mocking moments she draws herself reading Ulysses with "What the fuck?" printed over her head while a stack of Kate Millet and Radclyffe Hall queer classic sits next to her enticingly. She then proceeds to draw the parallel between hers and her father's relationship with that of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom - inverting our expectations (and succeeding in being the first person to convincingly reference Ulysses with emotional resonance and humility).

Bechdel's constructions are deceptively simple, her drawings look quick and effortless but belie a painstaking process by which she builds her world. Autobiography is always a process of self created and sustained memories, reconstructed for an audience, but something about the way that Bechdel uses the process as the result is truly unique and arresting. She is unsure about what the past means, and she takes us along with her as she attempts to decipher it all. Bechdel does this with a reliance on the aesthetic, the image, creating an even stronger link than she could have just by writing about her relationships. From her father's obsessive attention to the details of their imposing house to her own very clear dependence on the visual she makes those connections permanent.

Ghost World by Daniel Clowes

The movie version of Ghost World has always had a special place in my heart, it's a movie about a lot of things but ultimately it's about being a weirdo and reaching out to connect with other weirdos in whatever way you can so that you can feel supported and whole. I wasn't expecting the original comic to be an exact predecessor of the film, but I wasn't expecting it to be an entirely different animal. Ghost World is a short, punctuated comic serialized and then released as a complete story much later.

In the comic Enid and Rebecca's actions are much more episodic, becoming an exagerrated ode to voyeurism, following them following others and never bridging the gap between those strangers as the film does. There is no love story, no Seymour, no summer school and Rebecca isn't nearly the kind of stick in the mud that she becomes in the film. Still, even with its lack of narrative focus, you really get a sense of Enid who remains the center of the story - her frustrations and jealousies expressed both outwardly and inwardly. Her and Rebecca have that kind of high school friendship that is obsessive and romantic and completely codependent all at the same time. That emotional confluence runs true through the comic and the film, their entrance into the real world not only forces them to figure out what they want to do, but it also forces them to consider each other in a more "adult" light. Their relationship cannot translate itself into "real world" terms. The hardest thing for me about leaving home was separating myself from my high school best friend, realizing that we would develop inside jokes and lives with other people, that we would no longer share the exact same cultural context. It's a devastating realization and well suited to Clowes's territory.

Clowes seems to have an interesting relationship with his characters. He is at once unsparing in representing their flaws and insecurities but there is never a doubt that he feels a kind of kindred spirit compassion for them. Enid is very familiar to me, as a person who similarly hid behind taste and disaffection because it seemed infinitely more interesting than falling apart or falling in line. I have read a lot of criticism of Clowes for his depiction of Enid's sexuality or lack thereof, but I also think that this is a very unique representation of an individuals attitudes toward sex. Enid is an obsessive aesthete, manipulating her style and attributing meanings to benign details - for me, it seemed as if her sexuality was so linked to this, so linked to an internal impression of the way things should be, that she couldn't let herself explore human connection. One of the more charming moments that could have gone horribly wrong in the hands of another writer - he lets Enid wax poetic about how she imagines this author - Daniel Clowes - to be her ideal, physically, culturally and otherwise. She goes to a signing and of course is disappointed, because the world can necessarily never conform to your exact imaginings of it. Enid's sexuality to me represents a frustration you rarely see in fiction - the frustration of an overly imaginative somewhat cerebral girl whose expectations are so thwarted that she just puts her desires on the backburner.

Anyway, it was nice that reading the comic was such a different experience to a movie that is so dear to my heart. I appreciate that the movie developed the love story that was so impossible to create for the comic book version of Enid and that we get to see such short bursts of daily life from characters that clearly have so much depth even in their most seemingly shallow moments. Ultimately, the film and the movie both hilariously represent the frustrations of feeling apart from the rest of the world, the longing to belong that sits side by side with the pride in difference and maybe a little hatred (maybe a lot) of the rest of the world.